


Paid Shipping

by LtHargrove



Category: Phoenix Point (Video Game)
Genre: Explicit Language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-01
Updated: 2019-01-01
Packaged: 2019-10-02 10:35:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17262692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LtHargrove/pseuds/LtHargrove
Summary: A security sector expert is briefly interviewed about the Big Egg Incident by a Phoenix Project member.





	Paid Shipping

My professional opinion, eh? I've no bloody clue what happened on Echo Gamma, but I reckon it's not the answer you're looking for. I will share some of my conjectures, but only, and I mean ONLY if I remain anonymous and you never attribute them to my employer, got it mate? Alright then.

At first I reacted like pretty much everyone else. I was at sea and it was around 1 a.m. I had just been thrashed at poker by the second mate and I was trying to fall asleep until my phone rang. A bloke from the company, let's call him Jack, linked me a vid on the messenger and told me to watch it. I thought it was a pretty good found footage movie trailer, but also wondered why in the hell did he just wake me up to see a bleeding trailer. Before I could say anything he told me that the rig from the footage had sunk for real and the recording was uploaded by his old mate who works for Vanadium. I asked him if Tobias West was doing a collab with the SciFi channel, figjams like him tend to do such things after all, but then I noticed the tone of his voice. You see, I worked with Jack for a long time. It's not like he can't have a laugh, he's just not the type to pull off random nonsense. Something had to be up. I fired up my laptop. The news headlines read the search and rescue operation was unsuccessful. I've downloaded the video from YouTube and rewatched it frame by frame. If this stuff is not staged... I mean, fuck me dead and bury me pregnant, nobody has ever seen something like this before. From little that was recorded you can tell the attackers were sort of coordinated, but they didn't behave like you ought to when assaulting anything. They didn't look like anyone who could possibly attack an oil rig either, they were also quite numerous. The bleeding Kraken tearing everything up at the end is just a bonus.

Allow me to digress for a bit, okay? Take this as an example: a container ship takes some cars in Rio de Janeiro, drops by Buenos Aires to pick up some soy or whatever, unloads cargo in Cape Town and carries on to Singapore. The crew are underpaid Filipinos, the officers are Indian, the chief engineer is a Geordie, the boat is registered in Liberia and the company office is in Canada. Maritime transport is one of the industries that makes the world go round, but high seas aren't exactly the safest place on Earth. The incident we're talking about here is only the last one in a long series of security threats people like me are supposed to eliminate. Suffice to say we've been under a lot of pressure lately.

The Mariana Cloud being linked to the Pandora Virus by recent research is a big deal. After it was hypothesised the Samudr is an engineered virus East Asia almost blew up. Almost the same stuff is present in the hundreds of miles wide mist slowly spreading over the Pacific. The implications are honestly terrifying and go beyond missing vessels or people walking into the sea. Nobody can quite understand what Pandora actually is at this point and who or what is responsible. The situation is slowly degrading into a tangled mess. If that continues we might find ourselves amidst the next Cuban Crisis soon and I wish I was exaggerating. Now, I have an idea about Echo Gamma. Do you remember where the Pandora Virus was first discovered? It was found in permafrost by the American Antarctic Expedition. This is why this one recent investment has caught my attention – an international research company called EnyoSec has built an outpost in Antarctica. I'm surprised this flew under the radar, defence company presence there is toeing the Antarctic Treaty. Anyway, there've been rumours that Tobias West is interested in EnyoSec shares. It might not be a coincidence it was Vanadium operators who were protecting Echo Gamma. Its location, the way it was destroyed, all the things I've mentioned before, it leads me to believe they might have been researching Pandora Virus there. People often forget Vanadium is much more than a PMC with bad public rep, their technology branch produces things of beauty. I know the only base for my claims are scraps of info, but it's all I've got.  
As to the attack itself, I can't say if the uploaded video is genuine. Logic says it's a hoax, but the world's an increasingly crazier place. Assuming it's real, I'd guess the assailants were people wearing some organic-looking, powered exoskeletons. This doesn't explain why would they behave the way they did, what was that giant tentacle or the myriad of other questions, but it's the best my conventional expertise can come up with. I mean, they couldn't have been aliens. Should an incident like this happen again there's bee's dick of a chance a regular security detail and some barbed wire could repel it. We need to know what's out there and I hope this initiative of yours accomplishes something in the UN. I wish international cooperation wasn't a joke.

So, yep. Best of luck.

**Author's Note:**

> For official Phoenix Point fiction, read those:
> 
> https://phoenixpoint.info/downloads/bv1/  
>  https://phoenixpoint.info/downloads/bv2/  
>  https://phoenixpoint.info/downloads/bv3/  
>  https://phoenixpoint.info/downloads/bv4/  
>  https://phoenixpoint.info/downloads/bv5/  
>  https://phoenixpoint.info/downloads/bv6/
> 
> Special thanks to Allen Stroud for putting up with many weird and specific lore questions we ask him on Discord.


End file.
